Updater - Part I

I’ve started to implement an updater. Since it’s a lot to explain and since my work is not done yet, I will do it step by step. The user will be able to use 2 check boxes that allow NaroCAD to search for nightly builds, stable builds or nothing at all. I will use a button with different colors in order to tell the user if new updates are available, if files are being downloaded, or if the latest download is finished. One of my purposes is to download as less as possible in order to update NaroCAD. This is why I will use a versioning file that contains the current version (nightly or stable) and information about critical files in NaroCAD. As expected, newer versions will have a different version number and some of the files will disappear, new ones might probably appear or some of them might change because new features were implemented. In order to investigate if one of these files was changed, I decided to check the length of the file and its hash code. With this strategy, just a few files will be downloaded for each new NaroCAD version. I will end for today with the explanation of the 2 check boxes: the first one is called “Check for updates”; if this check box is unchecked, NaroCAD will not search for any new updates. When checking it, a new check box will appear “Experimental builds (nightly)”; if the user doesn’t check it, only the stable builds will be downloaded. If both of them are checked, NaroCAD will search for every Nightly Build. Note that the nightly builds contain the stable builds, so don’t worry, no features will be lost.